11.02.2025

Project Blue Book case review: January - June 1952

This is the latest edition of the Project Blue Book case review covering the year 1952. Like the previous evaluations, I tried to examine each case to see if the conclusion had merit. I added comments to help clarify the explanation or if I felt it was not correct or adequate. Items marked with red highlighting had photographs in the case file.

Summary

The reports from the first half of 1952 were quite extensive and exhausting to review. Some of them were pretty poor and others were missing critical information. Starting in April, just about any object seen in the sky was being reported to ATIC. Some of these were easy to explain. Others were not. There were a lot of unidentified sightings.

Korea had a bunch of sightings that appear to have been balloons and balloons with flares/lighting. It is not surprising that with fighting still going on in the region that balloons and other airborne devices would be employed for various reasons (such as luring heavy weapons to reveal their positions).

I relabeled one sighting as UNIDENTIFIED. This was the June 6 sighting in the region of Minneapolis, Minnesota. A pilot flying over the region stated he saw red streaking objects ever few seconds, flying to his altitude of 5,000 feet and then descending to 500 feet.

Blue Book listed this as tracers because he was flying over an army range that was conducting live fire exercises. However, they were only firing 50 caliber rounds and they stated they were not firing in the sky and the maximum altitude of the rounds would only be 150 feet or so. What the pilot reported did sound like tracers but he implied they were at the altitude, or above, his aircraft.

I thought he might have seen a fragmenting meteor but the description implied this happened over several minutes. Unless the pilot erred in his description and the objects were below his aircraft, I could not use the tracer explanation. As a result, I put it under the UNIDENTIFIED category.

There were also some radar cases from New Mexico on April 30 and May 25 that were interesting as well. They indicated an object moving at speeds higher than anything man-made at the time. However, the target was only visible for a few sweeps, nobody saw anything visually, and there were no sonic booms in the region. It makes one suggest that the contacts were radar ghosts of some kind. Blue Book listed it as ECM/Jamming. I don’t think that is an accurate description but I agree that what was being recorded was some sort of false targets. On both dates there were temperature inversions at very high altitude between 12,000 meters and 16,000 meters. The temperature inversions were not very significant at that altitude but they could have played a role in producing

these false echoes.

Next issue, I will review July of 1952, which had about 400 sightings. Not all have case files and it will be a difficult task to go through all of the sightings, which is why I will only do one month for the next issue.

Quelle: SUNlite 5/2024